Tearful tale of three bears

The Malayan sun bear has been described as having powerful hooked claws which can disembowel dogs.

“ONCE upon a time there were three bears.” Some readers may well remember their primary school’s storybook about daddy, mummy and baby bear. In 2100, my modification of the opening line of ‘The Tale of the Three Bears’ may well ring true unless mankind comes to grips with itself.

Imprisoned bears

Apart from seeing different species of bear in zoo enclosures, I have come close to two bear species in the wild. Whilst staying in the Transylvanian Alps, Romania, in 1993, at 2am one day in 1993, I got within 5m of a hotel’s garbage skip to witness a female European bear and her two cubs scavenging for vegetable and meat morsels. Suddenly the mother bear stood up on her hind legs and glowered at me with a menacing roar. I flashed my camera and ran like fury. The next morning I foolishly traced the bears’ spoors deep into the surrounding pine forests and as the forest got darker so my courage to continue failed me.

Some days later, by pure chance, I visited a local village and inquisitively entered the open backyard of a farm only to witness the most appalling animal sight. There were five fully grown, darkish brown bears each held in a minute cage, lying prostrate and unable to raise their bodies. From these dishevelled bears’ stomachs a plastic tube drip-fed into a disused plastic water bottle. These bears’ gall bladders were being tapped for bile to be sold to the traditional Chinese medicine market.

Elsewhere in a market square, I saw a tame bear tethered by a ring through its nose to a wooden post whilst its owner played folk music on his accordion and the poor bear was made to stand up on her hind legs and dance. As the crowds gathered, I left in disgust.

With equal disgust, eight years ago, I visited a recreational park near Miri for an afternoon’s stroll and came across a Malayan sun bear tethered by its collar to a pillar at the entrance to a snack bar. This poor creature was supposedly a tourist attraction. Local families passed by without flinching and with total disinterest. Suffice to say I cringed and ate nothing there.

These three close-hand encounters displayed the maltreatment of bears in captivity and epitomise the ways in which some humans exploit wild animals poached for monetary gain at the end of the last century and in the early 21st century.

It is easy to point a finger at other nations and we should not forget this year, in the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth, that Elizabethan England once experienced bear-baiting with dogs and that betting on dogs was rife.

There were even dancing bears. In 2016, there are plans to reintroduce wild European bears and wolves in some remoter wilderness parts of the UK but not without objections from farmers.

Giant pandas consume up to 14kg of bamboo shoots daily.

Three Asian bears

The giant panda’s name comes literally from traditional Chinese meaning ‘the black and white cat-foot’ and first came to Westerners’ attention through the writings of a French missionary, Father (Pere) Arnaud David, in 1869. It only appeared in the western world in 1936 at a Chicago Zoo. Two years later, London Zoo acquired five pandas. Today the birth of any zoo’s giant panda cub is well documented by the world press.

The Indian sloth bear or labiated bear, so called because it noisily sucks out insects with its lower lip, is called ‘bahlu’ in Hindi. Rudyard Kipling in his famous children’s book ‘The Jungle Book’, first published in 1894, brought this bear to Western eyes through the bear character ‘Baloo’. Soon the new animated cinema version will be on the big screens worldwide.

The Malayan sun bear or ‘beruang madu’, was well documented in the 1916 posthumously published book, ‘A Naturalist in Borneo’, by Robert WC Shelford (a former curator of the Sarawak Museum). He details the distinctive characteristics of this bear with its “large cream-coloured patch under its throat and its powerful hooked claws which can disembowel dogs”.

Similar and distinctive features

All three bears have several attributes in common. They are reclusive mammals, only seen as adults in pairs for a very short mating season once every few years. With only one or two cubs born each time, their total population number is inevitably few.

In all three species, it is the mother bear who raises the cubs to adulthood as the male disperses after mating. Unlike their European and North American relatives, none of these Asian bears need to hibernate as the birth seasons are sensitively timed according to local climatic conditions and the availability of abundant vegetation and fruit.

The most voracious eater is the giant panda, consuming some 9kg to 14kg of bamboo shoots daily. Its large molar teeth easily crush the bamboo’s fibrous texture, which is low in nutrients. The sloth bear’s lower, rubber-like lip sucks out termites and ants from their nests and the sun bear, with its very sharp claws, can rip hollow trees apart in pursuit of honeycombs and insects, then using its amazingly long tongue to lick out the spoils.

The sloth bear and the sun bear are natural seed dispersal agents for wild fruit for their faeces deposit seeds. The sloth bear is by far the best tree climber using its long tail for balance and for hanging upside down. The sun bear can climb most trees in search of bees’ nests apart from the tallest emergent trees in the rainforest.

The Indian sloth bear noisily sucks out insects with its lower lip.

A wake-up call

There is still hope for the survival of these three bear species in the wild in all countries but only with strict legal enforcement and heavy penalties, to include imprisonment plus fines, for poachers and those involved in the illegal wildlife trade. China has established over 40 giant panda reservations and near Sandakan, Sabah, the Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre (BSBCC) was established in 2008. This is next door to the Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre at Sepilok. Sadly there has been an estimated 30 per cent decline in the Malayan sun bear population in the last 30 years. Valuable information may be gleaned from www.bsbcc.org.my.

On a cloudless night, as I look up at the northern hemisphere heavens, I can recognise the two starry constellations of Ursa Major (The Great Bear or the plough) and Ursa Minor (The Small Bear) and I offer a silent prayer for the preservation of the real bears on Earth.

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